


Kraden and the Flash Ant

by OspreyEamon



Series: Golden Sun Drabbles [1]
Category: Ougon no Taiyou | Golden Sun
Genre: Drabble Collection, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2008-12-03
Updated: 2008-12-03
Packaged: 2017-11-05 11:32:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/405928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OspreyEamon/pseuds/OspreyEamon





	1. Kraden and the Flash Ant

The final monster screeched in fury seeming to grow as electric blue feathers were spread out like the wings of a particularly garish angle of death. Red eyes blazed with bloodlust and cruel crawls flexed in anticipation. It was promptly fried by a lightning bolt and keeled over.

 

“You’re losing your touch,” Jenna said teasing. “I still can’t believe you actually _missed_ that first time.”

“If you hadn’t gone for it and gotten in my way I wouldn’t have. You were just like, _woo woo_!” Sheba replied jumping up and down waving her hands at the smoldering harpy her psynergy flaring ineffectively.

 

Felix, of course, said nothing.

The three of them were standing in a clearing in the Osenian bush which was now deserted, save for the mangled corpses that lay spread out around them or hung from the branches of some of the nearby trees. Felix was cleaning his sword and Jenna was attempting to ring the blood out of her hair. Monster gore always seemed to get everywhere and followed the adepts like some aggravatingly persistent door-to-door salesman – or Garet after the smell of roast beef.

“Did anyone see where Kraden went?” asked Sheba after awhile. The sage was indeed nowhere to be seen.

“No, last I saw of him was when I fried those three emus with beam and caught the kobold behind them in the spill off. Felix?”

 

Her brother just shook his head.

 

“He must be around here _somewhere_ ,” Sheba said irritably.

 

Approximately forty seconds later, the adepts had found Kraden. Jenna’s eyes followed the flash ant as it bounced up and down in time to the high pitched squeals that emerged from the foliage above it whenever it jumped. The critter was all of thirty centimeters high and would have easily been crushed to a puddle of greenish juice if Kraden had dropped but one of his beloved Alchemistic texts on it.

“Ah! There you are!” The puny blue boxing gloved insect leapt again and there was another shriek. “S-so would you mind helping me down from here? This little - _oh oh_ \- fellow doesn’t seem to want me to- _help help get it away from me it’s going to e-eat me_!”

Jenna face palmed. Sheba turned her eyes skyward and muttered “Why do we keep him around again?”


	2. Kraden and the Invisible Rock

Kraden didn’t really understand how the psynergy Reveal worked, but that had not stopped him from giving his companions an extremely long lecture on it. The explanation had contained the words ‘photo optical’ and the phrase ‘transparency of the selected object’ was used numerous times.

His theory had been proven false when he tossed a small chunk of the crystal that littered the floor in the dim, dimensionally impossible chamber in the heart of Air’s Rock at the place where the stepping (or more accurately leaping) stone that the three Adepts had just crossed had been and watched it drop down…

…and down…

…and down…

…and down.

It never went plop.

That left him standing on the wrong side of the chasm with no way of rectifying the situation as he had proven that Reveal did not merely make invisible stuff visible again. Kraden had just finished his attempt to make up for his incomprehensible web of white lies by presenting them with a new, more accurate hypothesis which took into account the behavior of the stone. He looked hopefully from one face to another before reiterating his appeal to Sheba to bring the leaping stone back.

“The thing is Kraden, this isn’t the first time you’ve done it. I mean, there was the time with the werewolves when you kept on calling them ly-whatits-”

“Lycanthropes,” Kraden injected and Sheba glowered before going on.

“-and saying that they were like that because of some weird yellow flower that only blooms in the moonlight. And then you said the damn harpies were some kind of were-bird and we shouldn’t kill them because they didn’t know what they were doing. And _then_ you said there was a giant monster with bunions hiding in that waterhole and tried to drag us away from it. _And then_ you kept on saying that there was a multicolored snake in the river and almost drowned because-”

“Alright, alright, I admit I was wrong about those things but that no reason to do this. Think of all the things we’ve been through together. And you need me, my knowledge of Alchemy will prove invaluable when we reach Jupiter Lighthouse. Felix agrees with me, don’t you Felix?” he appealed to the official group leader.

Felix looked at Jenna.

“We’ll give you one more chance, but your luggage is staying behind,” she said nodding the teetering stack of trucks stuffed with crucibles, jars of strange powers, carefully wrapped glass tubes and enough books to stock a small library.

“No,” said Kraden stubbornly. “If it stays, I stay too.”

Jenna looked at Felix. Felix shrugged.

“Okay.”

As the three Adepts walked away, Kraden’s shrieks of protest failed to echo around the chamber in a way which was decidedly creepy.

“You can’t do this! It makes a mockery of the canon! The canon I say!”

“What was that about?” Sheba asked Jenna when they had re-entered the world of normal proportions.

“Something weird to do with Alchemy I expect. Anyway, who cares?”


	3. Kraden and the Leaning Tower of Literature

“Felix, what the hell took you so long! I’ve been stuck up here for hours and -” Jenna broke off mid rant to stare at the person hovering beyond the window of the room she had been locked in. It wasn’t Felix. Or Sheba. She would have been less surprised if it had been Alex who had come to rescue her.

“I told you that you needed me!” said Kraden, grinning like an idiot as he swayed gently from side to side. “I told you that my research material would be useful!”

Jenna blinked. Her jaw hung open in a particularly unflattering manner and she looked like she’d been hit around the face with a wet fish… by a previously inanimate statue… which she’d just seen crushed by a falling piano.

“How in the name of Cybele did you get up here? _It’s three stories above the ground!_ ”

The three Adepts had gone back for the scholar after realizing that when they had incarcerated him in the heart of Air’s Rock he had still been in possession of all of their maps. After wandering for five days in the desert and almost dying of thirst they had reluctantly agreed to return and retrieve him. As Kraden had refused to reveal which piece of baggage the charts were hidden in and none of them had any desire to rummage amongst an assortment of objects that included the scholar’s dirty underwear, the luggage of doom had come with them as well. All fourteen trunks of it.

After having lugged Kraden’s luggage over most of Ocenia they had finally reached the town of Alphafra. Suffering from blisters, bad backs and renewed exasperation with the ever vexatious Alex they had jumped at mayor’s offer of a place to stay that wasn’t the briny over crowded inn.

However, it seemed that the universe was not above tormenting them in strange and disturbing ways. The events that had left Felix and Sheba wandering lost in the catacombs below the mayor’s house wearing matching ensembles of high heels, ‘satin’ ball gowns and sombreros and Jenna trapped in a room in the tallest tower that had an inordinate lack of bed sheets were not something that she would ever admit to anyone, under torture or otherwise.

And now Kraden had come to ‘save’ her. Perhaps she should have just blasted the door away after all.

In answer to her question Kraden gestured downwards and said proudly, “I made use of my library.”

Jenna peered out the window.

The stack of books was indeed an impressive creation, one that she had no idea how the old man had succeed in erecting, but it was swaying rather more than its designer had perhaps intended.

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

“Of course it’s safe, my dear. Now I’ll just hop in so you can take my place and descend…” Kraden reached for the sill and the tower finally overbalanced. Its collapse was quite impressive, as was the shriek Kraden made on the way down.


End file.
